Three Best Practice Frameworks for IT Continual Improvement

Feb 20 2019

If you want to optimize your IT department, there are plenty of approaches and methodologies to help you streamline operations. These frameworks have been tried, tested, and tweaked over the years and provide best practices for continual improvement so you can improve your IT department over time.

If you want to know your ITIL from your Six Sigma or your CBAP, you’ve come to the right place.

ITIL — Information Technology Infrastructure Library

ITIL is a collection of processes, practices and disciplines for IT Service Management. ITIL focuses on aligning IT services with the needs of the business through Service Strategy, Service Design, Service Transition, Service Operation, and Continual Service Improvement.

Examples of ITIL Best Practices

ITIL covers 26 different processes, including:

Availability management to ensure that applications are available to customers, employees, and other end users when needed.

Problem management to identify and resolve the underlying causes of IT incidents and events.

Advantages of Implementing ITIL in Your Business

ITIL will enhance the availability, responsiveness, and resilience of your IT applications and systems. It aligns IT service provision with business needs, provides a structured way to manage risks and incidents, and allows for portfolio planning and financial management. ITIL also covers the design of new IT services, introducing and changing technology, and continual improvement.

Six Sigma — Process Improvement

Six Sigma is a framework for designing and improving business processes, with a strong focus on metrics and measurable change. It concentrates on maximizing the efficiency, accuracy, quality, and speed of the inputs, processing, and outputs of business operations.

Examples of a Six Sigma Approach

Six Sigma can be used in several ways, with one of the most common being continual service improvement through DMAIC — Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control:

Define — this provides the scope of what a particular Six Sigma project is looking at and the process it is improving.

Measure — this identifies the key metrics that show how weela process is achieving its intended goals.

Analyze — this takes the key metrics and results to identify bottlenecks, flaws, and other issues with the operational process.

Improve — this implements changes into the process and identifies how those improvements impact on key metrics.

Control — this establishes measurements and controls if a process starts to fail once it has been fixed.

Advantages of Implementing Six Sigma in Your Business

Six Sigma will streamline and optimize your business processes. If you have operational processes that are slow, broken, or provide low-quality outputs, Six Sigma breaks those processes down to identify what is at fault. It then makes small, incremental changes to enhance quality, accuracy, efficiency, and speed.

CBAP — Certified Business Analysis Professional

CBAP is a qualification that business analysts can achieve to show they have the skills and experience to translate business needs into IT solutions. Although CBAP and business analysis has a strong technology component, possible solutions also include process improvement, strategic change, or shifts in the organization.

Examples of a Business Analysis Approach

Business analysis is made up of several related areas:

Enterprise or company analysis to understand how to meet needs of the overall business including medium- and long-term strategy and goals.

Requirements planning and management to help prioritize and develop requirements and manage the changes needed to implement them.

Requirements elicitation to collect actionable needs and requirements from stakeholders in a consistent and practical way.

Requirements analysis and documentation to specify requirements so they can be acted upon through a project or continual improvement.

Requirements communication to communicate and get agreement to requirements and solutions from business and technology stakeholders.

Solution assessment and validation to understand how effective a proposed solution is.

Advantages of Implementing CBAP in Your Business

A CBAP business analyst has the insight and knowledge needed to translate your business goals into projects and continual improvement initiatives that your IT department can implement.